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RE: Rural wireless Internet
Although Michele Gale-Sinex asked for local stories dealing with US
situations, I believe the case of developing countries provides an even more
striking situation that calls for wireless Internet-intranet-extranet
connectivity. Here are two little stories:
In 1988, while I was in charge of a UN-financed programme in the Sudan, I
realised that without some means of wireless communication we could not push
the project forward. Sudan is the largest country in Africa (2.4 sq. km.) and
the programme was to design a participatory development approach that would
help a population coming out of the throes of the droughts and famines of the
70s and 80s. Two American volunteer ham radio operators came to Sudan then
and helped us set up a packet radio system with solar energy, sdhort wave
radios and radio modems hooked up to Toshiba 1000 computers. This saved the
day for communications, including e-mail, file transfer and electronic
bulletin board services. It also saved lives. To this day it is the only
means of communication among many regions which hardly have usable roads.
Among other things, it also helped get ideas about sustainable agriculture
spread around.
In Jamaica a "Sustainable Development Network" being set up with the help of
the United Nations Development Programme is beginning to look like an
indispensable adjunct to integrated community development. This network,
which is being designed with Internet standards, has a bias in favour of
empowering local communities and giving them access to information in the form
of intranet and internet sites, live and interactive databases, etc. For this
work we need fast, state of the art technology, rather than primitive computer
technology. This is because for most community people in the Third World, the
written text is meaningless. But they are highly literate in voice, graphic
and picture communication (a la Paulo Freire). Fast wireless connections
would be a great boon where regular and mobile telephones are not available.
The same is even more true in countries like Bangladesh where line-of-site is
relatively unhampered across the country.
Communication for communities is an indispensable part of sustainable
development, and of redressing the balance of power between the haves and the
have-nots. This need is in sharp contrast to the policies and practices of
centralised communication authorities and government or private
telecommunication monopolies that charge unreasonable prices for Internet
access in the Third World which seem to be designed to make sure that the poor
never get access to information that might bring them out of poverty. [Here in
Jamaica, for example, an advanced country compared to many developing ones
with respect to telecommunications, unlimited access to Internet, which is a
must for community work, would cost of the order of US $2000 per month, or
more than a hundred times what commercial services charge in the US. Any one
with specific information and ideas of how fast wireless systems can be used
in such situations is invited to share it with us.
Taghi Farvar
Advisor to the National Poverty Eradication Programme
Kingston, Jamaica
tfarvar@InfoChan.COM or
taghi@msn.com